LOVETT: Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Salazar was first a registered Republican

Julia Salazar, running as a democratic socialist candidate for state Senate in Brooklyn, was once a Republican and only joined the Democratic Party last year. (Sam Fuller / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS)

Advertisement

ALBANY — Self-proclaimed democratic socialist Julia Salazar, who is running for state Senate from Brooklyn, was a registered Republican before moving to New York and only became a Dem a year ago, records show.

The first-time candidate also has barely voted. Until last year, she hadn’t gone to the polls since 2010, while living in Florida, records show.

Salazar, 27, is part of a wave of registered Democrats who identify as socialists in the footsteps of Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent of Vermont.

But for Salazar, the transition to Democrat is relatively new.

She registered as a Republican in December 2008, when she turned 18 while in Florida. After moving to New York to attend Columbia University, Salazar registered in March 2010 — not as a Democrat, but with the state Independence Party, mistakenly thinking, like many others, that it meant unaffiliated voters, her campaign spokesman said.

It was only in 2017 that she registered as a Democrat after moving to Brooklyn, where this year she is challenging longtime Sen. Martin Dilan in the Sept. 13 Democratic primary.

Salazar has won the backing of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who shockingly defeated veteran Queens Rep. Joseph Crowley in the June Democratic congressional primary, and actress Cynthia Nixon, who is facing off against Gov. Cuomo in the Sept. 13 Democratic gubernatorial primary.

“How do you go from Republican to democratic socialist all of a sudden?” Dilan asked. “I think she needs to explain it to the community that she claims to want to represent.”

Her campaign spokesman, Michael Kinnucan, said Salazar, a naturalized citizen who lived in Colombia before coming to the U.S. with her family, grew up in a conservative family.

She first registered as a Republican because “she had conservative views at the time of graduating high school,” Kinnucan said.

“But they quickly changed as she went to college in 2009” and engaged in activism against police brutality and for anti-war efforts and later helped advocate for the Right to Know Act that would impose new transparency rules on the NYPD during stops, he said.

Still, she did not register as a Democrat when she went to register in New York in March, 2010. Instead, she enrolled in the state Independence party, mistakenly thinking, like so many others, that it meant she was an unaffiliated voter, Kinnucan said.

Kinnucan didn’t say why she wanted to register an unaffiliated independent instead of a Democrat other than her views were still evolving.

Advertisement

Salazar didn’t vote in New York until 2017, meaning she stayed out of the Donald Trump-Hillary Clinton election. Kinnucan said at the time she felt the elections were stacked toward incumbents.

“She was very politically engaged, but like a lot of young New Yorkers, she didn’t see much on the table in terms of voting,” Kinnucan said. “She saw incumbents getting reelected again and again and the general dysfunction.”

But it was the result of the Trump and Sanders campaigns that Salazar “decided it was very important to expand her grass-roots activism into electoral work and registered as a Democrat,” he said.

A Democratic insider said “in 2018, down is apparently up.”

“Cynthia Nixon is a multi-millionaire actress parading around as a socialist with a self-proclaimed progressive Julia Salazar who was a registered Republican until five minutes ago, and (the Working Families Party) is trying desperately to claim credit for a woman (Ocasio-Cortez) who they not only didn’t endorse, but they can’t even get on their line,” the Dem said. “The one thing they all share in common is that they aren’t fooling anyone.”

*****

In her first TV ad, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Chele Chiavacci Farley accuses Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of being more interested in running for President than delivering for New York.

The ad, which will run statewide on cable television as part of a six-figure buy, highlights that New York sends $48 billion more to Washington annually in taxes than it receives back.

“While Gillibrand’s busy running for President, she’s letting New York taxpayers get ripped off,” Farley says in the ad, before concluding that “instead of a promotion, Gillibrand should be fired.”

Gillibrand spokesman Glen Caplin said “Kirsten will be focused on running a positive campaign based on her core values.”

*****

Nixon, lieutenant governor candidate and City Councilman Jumaane Williams and state Attorney General wannabe Zephyr Teachout paid the progressive Working Families Party a combined $81,500 for petition efforts to get on the primary ballot.

While promising a strong “volunteer army”, the Working Families Party, as first reported by the Daily News, also hired people to gather petition signatures to help with the effort.

Nixon paid the party $40,500 and Teachout $37,500 toward the effort. Williams, who has raised little money, chipped in just $3,500.

The three, who each needed 15,000 valid signatures to get on the ballot, collected tens of thousands more “garnered by thousands of grass-roots volunteers,” Working Families Party spokesman Joe Dinkin said.

“But we all agreed early on that it made sense to run a paid petitioning drive, too, just for insurance,” Dinkin said.

“There’s nothing grassroots about paying tens of thousands of dollars for a ‘volunteer’ operation,” Smith said. “Only the fiction Cynthia Nixon is peddling could make ‘Sex and the City’ look like a documentary.”